


Dirk Strider Kins Rainbow Dash

by Sollux-Captor (Nightwing132)



Category: Homestuck, MSPA Forums
Genre: Character Study, Essays, Gen, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-20
Updated: 2019-02-20
Packaged: 2019-11-01 12:44:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17867519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nightwing132/pseuds/Sollux-Captor
Summary: Short meta Essay about Dirk, his splinters, and Rainbow Dash





	Dirk Strider Kins Rainbow Dash

“A Glance at the Expression of Self-hatred in Homestuck through Dirk Strider.”

Alternatively titled; “Dirk Strider Kins Rainbow Dash because He Seeks a Sense of Genuine Self-love” 

 

Dirk is an elaborate character who revolves around the complexities of his identity. Being a heart player, his splinters, and overall characterization are all an expression of Dirk’s identity issues or to be more exact his loathing towards himself. Therefore, I think it’s important to dissect the characters that Dirk admires and their relation to him, as you can often tell a lot about a person’s identity from the characters they appreciate.

 

So, Rainbow Dash. If you’re not familiar with My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (shame on you) Rainbow Dash is the blue pony with rainbow hair that Dirk has a poster of. She’s an interesting character that holds a lot of similarities with Dirk. She’s the most prideful of the main cast and kind of self-centered, however despite these flaws she’s a loyal friend and strong leader. It’s very easy to see what Dirk likes about her, but more than that, it seems apparent that Dirk doesn’t just see himself in Rainbow Dash, He sees what he would like to be within her character: Genuinely, non-ironically, confidant in herself, and loved by her friends.

 

In popular literature horses often represent freedom, something that Dirk doesn’t have, he is very much a character in captivity and his captor is often depicted as his own identity. 

 

Dirk is without a doubt a control freak, attempting to set the Alpha session up so he's the one pulling the strings and it seems that Dirk feels most comfortable when in control and when he has a sense of power (real or not) over those around him. The issue of course is that Dirk is never actually in control, his autoresponder, lil’hal, is the real puppet master when it comes to setting up the game and he never really has the amount of power over his friends that he might’ve wanted too, he couldn’t control any of their actions in the long run. While Dirk of course has his own mind games, he’s just a much a player in them as everyone else is, with them often having negative drawbacks towards his own goals and leaving him feeling as though he has failed ethier his friends or himself.  

 

Dirk feels like he needs to be in control and since he can’t control his friends, the game, or his world, he attempts to enforce control over his AI, this doesn’t go well. Then of course, seeing as his AI is a reiteration of himself, it tries to control Dirk and I think subcutaneously (or perhaps ‘ironically’) Dirk also forces himself into a form of captivity, not allowing himself to express genuine emotion out of fear and self-loathing, because despite the pride and arrogance within his character, it’s clear that Dirk hates himself. This is made apparent throughout almost all interactions with his splinters, though perhaps none more so than his confrontation with lil’hal/AR :

 

**TT: How cool do you think it is having my own godawful personality mirrored back at me all the time, reminding me what it must be like when other people have to deal with me?**

**TT: Or constantly having all the consequences and fuckups resulting from my batshit thought processes amplified because there's another version of my crazy brain out there dangerously overclocked by a supercomputer which believes, just as mistakenly as my own broken mind, that it's operating in my best interest???**

**TT: Do you have any idea how fucking sick I am of myself?**

**TT: I am completely worn out with my own identity. It's like I'm drowning in my own dismal persona.**

**TT: I feel totally surrounded by it, inside and out. I can't escape from myself.**

**TT: There seems to be no end to me. Like, wherever my mind falters, or threatens to retreat into the void in any way, my splinters pick up the slack, ensuring there'll always be more of myself than I could ever know what to fucking do with.**

**TT: And you're always there to remind me of that, and throw it all in my face. God, I even built you to LITERALLY BE IN MY FACE, ALL THE TIME. It's like I subconsciously invented you just to troll myself, and never for a single fuckin' moment do you let me down.**

 

Dirk is trapped, by his own hands and his own self, in a self-destructive spiral of hatred and anguish, ensuring that he is incapable of expressing any form of non-ironic emotion or action because if he were to do so, he would almost certainly face mockery or backlash in the form of his splinters or his own subconscious. In short, Dirk Strider is his own abuser, there is a sort of literary analogue between beta Dirk’s abuse of Dave and alpha Dirk’s own self-hatred. Beta Dirk’s abuse results in Dave fearing genuine emotion, hiding behind the cloak of irony, and promotes the growth of toxic masculinity. Alpha Dirk’s self-hatred leads him into a spiral of self-destructive toxic masculinity and the fear of non-ironic self expression. 

 

It’s fascinating to note that on a level, Dirk seems to be aware of this. Afterall he has a great interest in philosophy, the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. Dirk is aware of his existence and he seems to hate it. 

 

Homestuck has an interesting way of expressing self-loathing and Heroic Self-Deprecation. Thanks to alternate universes, sprites, timelines, dream bubbles, ect., we are able to see characters interacting with themselves or a version of themselves in a physical sense. Which has lead to some engrossing encounters. The physical fight between Jade and Jadesprite, the constant arguing between past, present, and future karkat in memos (that gets even more enthralling when you consider the romantic connotations involved with hatred in troll society, but that’s for another paper). Homestuck doesn't shy away from making characters who hate themselves, literally, face themselves. 

 

No one in homestuck has to deal with the consequences of this more than Dirk, who as he stated himself, literally has a reiteration of himself stuck directly onto his face for the near entirety of the story. Thus enabling his self-induced torture and providing a constant reminder and enforcer of his own prison built from satire and his toxic ideology of what makes a person strong.  

 

Homestuck explores a myriad of mental health issues, some of which are done poorly and some of which are done magnificently. The deconstruction of self-hatred in homestuck belongs to the latter group. We are presented with characters who resolve their issues in the matter, we are presented with characters who do not, and characters who just perhaps start too but we never really see completely forgive themselves. Dirk belonging to the latter. 

 

Dirk has the ability to become a better person, the capability to become more than just self-destructive and controlling. We see this on multiple occasions, he is willing to sacrifice his life for the safety of his friends, who he does love, without a doubt. However, he has to slip free from his own controlling nature in order to express his affections in a healthy manner. 

 

So, back to Rainbow Dash. Rainbow Dash, who is snarky, who considers herself to be a cool older sis to her more or less adopted little sister, the fastest person alive in her universe, who is innocently insensitive to her friends needs until they point them out to her, an arrogant and prideful want-to-be leader. The parallels between Dirk and Rainbow Dash do not stop. 

 

The great difference between them is that she is able to enjoy herself free from the self-imposed restraints that all of Dirk and his splinters exist within. If horses represent the freedom that Dirk doesn’t have because he is trapped for his entire childhood in a small apartment building surrounded by a flood of water in a hostile environment that wants to kill him. Then Rainbow Dash represents the freedom that Dirk doesn’t have because he won’t allow himself it. During his introduction Dirk says all of his likes are ironic, with perhaps, the exception of Rainbow Dash - his non-satirized want for happiness, friendship, and love. 

  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on twitter @ConfirmedTrash for more bad Meta.   
> Leave a comment or you'll make me cry.


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